Much of the Great War was fought from the trenches that soldiers dug, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border across the Western Front. An estimated four million soldiers were living, fighting, and dying in trenches by the summer of 1915. Conditions were often wretched, but soldiers attempted to create a few creature comforts in fortified bunkers.

The tightly packed composition of Dix's etching suggests the claustrophobic conditions of these underground hideouts. The pocked skin of the man on the left is perhaps a reference to the constant scourge of lice and fleas that shared the trenches with the soldiers.

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